Getting the word out about your business is hard. We get it. Between running your business or serving a dozen clients, you’re one little hiccup away from feeling completely overwhelmed. Under all that pressure, it’s easy to either fall back on last year’s outreach plan or just do nothing and watch your competitors snap up all your potential leads.
But don’t sweat. Let’s chat about the Google Display Network (GDN).
The power of images
The Google Display Network is a massive ecosystem of websites that reaches 90% of internet users worldwide—a staggering 394 billion people!—where you can place display ads via your Google Ads account. Display ads allow you to include images in your ads, not just text, making them a vital tool to raise awareness for your brand.
An example of a display ad (Don’t worry—this blog post won’t explode on you.)
Why? Images both ignite interest immediately and trigger long-term memory. As Miriam Elkorchi, a member of our Customer Success team, shared at her recent WordStream Live presentation in San Francisco, our sense of sight engages 30% of our brains, in comparison to touch engaging 8% and hearing 3%. Plus, images go into our long-term memory, while words go into short-term. So if you want to raise awareness for your brand with a medium that will (a) grab people’s attention right away and (b) make them remember you, then display ads could be right for your business.
Oh, and despite the Display Network’s humongous audience, your display ads’ cost per click would be about 76% lower, on average, than on the search network. Pretty sweet, right?
As you’re very aware, the problem with using display ads to raise awareness for your business is that it kind of requires making the ads. Which requires graphic design skills. Not to mention that most rare commodity of all for small biz advertisers and agencies: time.
Hang tight. Help is on the way.
Introducing the Smart Ads Creator from WordStream
When we saw that one in four small businesses doesn’t advertise on the Google Display Network, we knew we had to help. How awesome would it be if there were a simple, easy-to-use, fun tool that would create animated display ads for you, freeing you up to run your business and go home on time?
Meet our Smart Ads Creator, a new free tool designed to empower you to create custom, animated display ads that look awesome and actually work in a matter of minutes. No designer? No time? No problem.
How does it work? Just copy and paste the URL for your website or a specific product or landing page into the Creator, tell us what you want your display ads to accomplish, and off you go!
Then, our free ad creator explores your site, snags your best images and copy, and crafts a variety of animated display ads in a wide selection of standard sizes you can use on the Display Network. If the ad preview doesn’t show you what you wanted, you can change the theme, colors, copy, images, and more.
Once you’re happy with your ads, just type in your email, and we’ll provide access to ZIP files for seven different ad sizes, ready to upload to your Google Ads account.
With the Smart Ads Creator, there’s no need to hire a graphic designer or to bother the one you’ve got. Just upload, download, and go. It’s that easy.
Let’s take a closer look at how the Smart Ads Creator can help you push toward your marketing and advertising goals.
Make HTML5 ads that are actual magic
You know what’s cool about the Smart Ads Creator? It makes ads that move.
The Smart Ads Creator generates high-quality, mobile-friendly, animated HTML5 display ads. According to one Adform study, dynamic animated ads see a 267% higher click-through-rate than their static Muggle cousins. With the Smart Ads Creator, you get ads that are ready-made not just to raise awareness for your brand, but also to drive website traffic and push you one step closer to your conversion goals.
Those of you who are familiar with Google’s native display ad builder will know that this tool lets you embed video into its otherwise static display ads. If you have the resources to create killer video content, and you already have some display advertising experience under your belt, the native Google display ad builder may be right for you. The more power to you! But otherwise, the ads produced by the native Google builder are pretty static. For the many small businesses who don’t have the resources to make videos, the Smart Ads Creator’s ability to build animated display ads is pretty magical.
Make lots of magical ads
Ask any graphic designer: The most annoying parts of the job are (a) making a thousand different versions of the same asset in different sizes or formats, and (b) making and re-making a thousand changes to an asset based on non-designers’ helpful feedback, like, “Could this banana feel more, like, banana-y?”
Guess what? The Smart Ads Creator automatically builds ads for you in seven different standard sizes to use on the Google Display Network—no manual resizing or reformatting needed. Plus, you can run the Smart Ads Creator multiple times a day to create ads for multiple websites.
And don’t forget—you can customize them as much as you want. Don’t like the graphics or text that our tech pulled from your site? You can upload your own images, swap in your own text, change the hex colors, change the theme, you name it! As soon as you make an edit, the Smart Ads Creator will refresh the ad preview so you can see your changes in real time.
Don’t like your edits? You can change it back, try something else, whatever, and it’ll automatically refresh the preview right away. There’s no limit to what you can try! So why not make it rain?
We work, you play
Which brings me to my last point: The Smart Ads Creator is fun. We do the hard part—and you do the creative part.
If you always thought that display advertising was out of reach—whether you’ve felt held back by not having access to a graphic designer or by your lack of budget—why not give this a try? Drop a URL from your website (or a client’s, if you’re an agency!) into the Smart Ads Creator and see what happens. Experiment. Play with the colors and themes. Consider what calls to action have made you click on ads, or what messaging has performed best in your search campaigns, and try some of them out.
Ready to get started? Just visit the Smart Ads Creator on our website.
Explore. Learn. Play. Who knows what amazing thing you’ll create?